Hi again.

This is Agent Spencer talking.

I'm the new agent, and I'm invigorated by some of the amazing books I've rescued from the slushpile. But there's a lot of things I'd like to see that I'm not. Some specifics:

Mormon historical novels. This is a rich and deep vein that hasn't been explored. I'd love to see a well-written book about Zina Huntington, a secret wife to Joseph Smith and faith healer, in the vein of Orson Scott Card's Saints.

Crusades historical or fantistorical novels in the vein of George R.R. Martin, Jacqueline Carey or Bernard Cornwell. Give me blood-drenched battles, intricate politics, good old steamy sex and bring the religious frontiers of the medieval Mediterranean into it.

Victorian, Edwardian, or Regency fantasy. Given the massive success of this genre lately, I'm surprised at how little we see it in the slushpile. If you have the next Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrell, send me an email.

These are all genres where I'd accept the breaking of the traditional "word ceiling" for new authors, usually set around 100-120,000 words. Historical and fantasy novels need to be long and absorbing, and some new authors can pull it off. For shorter works, I'm always in the mood for a good memoir, particularly if it can deal with painful events through a good sense of humor. I also love Chuck Palahniuk and Dave Eggers, so if you can do literary satire, drop a note.

My inbox has been really cluttered lately at the agency with "You've won a billion dollars from the Bank of Africa" emails.

So if you send me a novel query, be sure to title it "Query:" and then the title of your book so I know you're not trying to get my urgent assistance in transacting the Very Large Sum of 9,600,000 dolars to the United States as it was the late Prince's dear wish.

I'm listening to General Conference and blogging at the same time, so you'll have to forgive me if some Mormon-isms make their way into this blog... even my blog on this internet in these latter days.

I've had a really exciting and whirlwind first week of school. I've always wanted to teach but I've been discouraged since starting graduate school at the fact that, rather than landing a full-blown TA-ship, I was given the pithy research assistant job. Actually, being a research assistant is a lot more fun than being a TA--the TAs don't get paid to read this book, and I did--but it's also a lot less financially secure. The TAs get their tuition and insurance paid, and get paid for a set number of hours a week, whether they work them, overwork them, or don't. The RAs (this is me) have to meet hours in order to pay our own insurance and usually borrow money to pay our tuition.

Last quarter I was assigned to my favorite teacher to be an RA since the original didn't have enough work for me. She immediately enlisted my help in writing study questions and reviewing materials for a class. In short, I've ended up as the TA and I get to stand before a classroom a little bit and help out.

It's a class in American Ethnic Identity and Coming of Age. I told that to a friend and she rolled her eyes. "Let's be multicultural, right. I feel like that's been shoved down my throat so much that I hate it." This is not exactly a backwoods hick. This girl lives in Seattle, works for Boeing, and last time I checked, her last three boyfriends were all of a different ethnicity.

So if this were just a class in PCisms, it would suck. Lucky for me it's a class in identity and in the history of those identities. We're reading the greatest greatest book ever, James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, as a way of absorbing the history behind current notions of race. We're also reading some funny and touching stories in a collection that isn't nearly as PC as it sounds, Growing Up Ethnic in America.

My teacher has made the point several times that there is no way to rank ethnicity. She compares it to the AA principle that all pain is equally valid. If one person comes into an AA meeting weeping over having not gotten a job they wanted, and another person comes in weeping because their son died, the meeting does not ignore one person's pain in the idea that the other's is more important. They try to give equal love and support to both. In the same way, this isn't a class in white guilt. This is a class in discovering identity. It's really neat and I'm glad I get a chance to be a part of it.

I came up with that title all by myself.

The answer to the above should be obvious, I guess. I got a rejection that, while it doesn't sting as much as last year's, still stings. I didn't get into the Clarion West Writing Workshop for this summer in Seattle. I still haven't heard from the Clarion San Diego workshop, but I was pulling more so for Seattle because 1) I had a good friend apply and 2) I could see Chrissy and Adia on weekends.

I've been writing a lot lately, and I don't think it'll stop because I don't go to an expensive workshop. But... fuhhhhhuuuwuaaaahaaaaahuuuuuuuhhhhhck.

Because I am a writer and deal in subtleties and hidden meanings, the title today has multiple meanings. For one, I am pushing myself to finish a story for WotF by this weekend. For another, I am also pushing myself to read all the full manuscripts sitting in my "Unread Fulls" folder so I can feel caught up. But for final, I have the world's worst cold and it feels like the Smurfs are busting out of my head.

This weekend Chrissy, Adia and I attended the madness that is NorWesCon, where I critiqued some stories and even sat in on my first panel. We didn't have Mary here this year, but we did have Ken Scholes, John Pitts, Jay Lake, Lisa Mantchev, Harold Gross, and a host of other wonderful people that I see far too little. I got to talk about where writers get their ideas to a full room with some other wonderful people, which was a lot of fun. We talked about dreams, word association, making up stories about place names on the freeway, or just dropping first lines. I still need a story to go with this first line: "The snow blew over five dead bodies, two large and three small."

I also talked about inserting one idea into another--like taking some of the disabled people I used to work with and putting them into my new novel.

We attended Talebones Live, which was a little underwhelming after the epic beauty of last year, but was still pretty good. We also saw a lot of people walking around on leashes, with little stars over their nipples, or in other ways contributing to the strange, strange atmosphere of NorWesCon.

I missed another panel and my reading to spend Easter with Chrissy's family and cook them dinner. I was so exhausted that I didn't stick around for dessert and collapsed into bed afterward. Now I have awoken with a nasty nasty cold virus that has me feeling like crap.

One of the weird things about being around my friends who are also some of my favorite writers is that in the past it's made me envious and depressed. This time it didn't, and believe me, just about anything can make me depressed coming out of finals week without any band practice. Instead, I got energized and woke up before the con to start a story. It's done now, and it's an absolute mess, but I think I'll have something for Writers of the Future this quarter. Excellent, he said while rubbing his hands together in a most cliched way.

For those of you who can't get enough of Spencer, my new band, Bad Motel, not to be confused with my old band Sam Stereo, has recorded and posted some demos.

http://myspace.com/badmotelband

I'm really proud of this band. We've managed to make stuff that sounds kind of bluesy rock and also complex at the same time, and our singer has one of those soulful voices I've always wanted to accompany my lyrics.

While I battle the beast of MySpace, here's some more nonfiction for my adoring fans. This one makes reference to the characters in The Second Funniest Story From My Mission.

Parts

Wayne backfilled his life with little bits of information, always couched in the form of stories. For a missionary, he'd lived a colorful life. "Did I ever tell you about the time I was in a high-speed chase with the cops?" "Did I ever tell you about the time my girlfriend and I made porn and my friends got ahold of it?"

There was only one story he told tersely, with no trace of embellishment. "My brother died when I was four. He was four-wheeling and it flipped over." There was never more than that detail--a seven-year-old brother, riding a four-wheeler who died under it.

It's the thing about funny stories. You tell enough of the story, and there are messy pieces--bits that don't fit, cutting room floor relics. It's all in what you leave out.

* * *

Merle--our nigga--had a wife named Jackie, a tiny little Cherokee woman with crooked teeth. When we went back to see him, Jackie welcomed us in. "Merle's not here, but I've talked to Mormon missionaries before. I like you guys."

"Can we give you a Book of Mormon, too?" we asked.

"I can't read," she said, in the same tone most people might say they couldn't skateboard. "Merle tries to teach me, but I get frustrated with it."

"Do you want to try reading now? We can help you."

She looked at the book and back at us. "Not right now," she said. "I get too frustrated."

When we left, with an appointment to come back, she smiled her big crooked smile. "I sure am glad Merle got saved in prison," she said. "I've always wanted to be Mormon, ever since I was a little girl."

We went back to Merle and Jackie's accompanied by a recently baptized couple named the Dorians. The Dorians were overwhelmingly friendly and homely. They were both pear-shaped and balding with large eyes and large smiles. I loved them--loved their innocence, their joy, their certainty. I wished I had it.

Merle and Jackie's house was dark and sweaty. "We didn't pay the power bill," Jackie said, "so we've got to sit in the dark. And of course the swamp cooler's out, too." We lit candles in the hot dark and read to them out of the Book of Mormon.

In the presence of the Dorians, or perhaps just for his wife's sake, Merle left the N-word out of the conversation. He just mentioned, "I done a lot of things I regretted before I was saved. I done drugs, I hurt people."

We passed the Book of Mormon around and each read into the quiet, hot dark, except Jackie. At the end of the night there was a feeling in the room that Merle expressed by saying, "I could just jump up and shout! I never knew what people was talking about till now!"
We asked Merle and Jackie, "Will you be baptized?" and they, through faces lit by pure joy, said, "Yes."

On the way home, we laughed with the Dorians about the reaction Merle and Jackie might get in church. "Where will they fit in?" I asked Brother Dorian. He replied, "What will happen the first time Merle gives a talk?"

Elder Pierce and I, laying on our beds across from each other, asked "Can Merle get baptized? Can you get baptized if you've killed people?"

"I don't know. I guess we'll figure it out soon enough."

The next time we went there, the house was empty. "They took off," their landlady yelled from her porch. "Don't know where they went."

Brother Dorian approached me in church a few times, his hands crossed on the bulge of his stomach. "Have we heard anything about Merle and Jackie?" I shook my head. At one point I said, "People we teach have a tendency to vanish."

I could see a little bit of his certainty fail.

What kind of an ending would that make? It's much better to leave it at the moment when Merle put his stained, scarred arms around us and said, "Y'all's my niggas now." The story is quick, clean, young. Add the rest and it gets older.

MySpace has long been known as a corporate front designed to fool innocent teenagers into eating babies and having orgies. But, much like a lousy lion tamer, I'm still trying to use the stupid ******* ******* ******* piece of ****.

My new band, Bad Motel, recorded some demos that are fully mixed. When enjoyed in their full capacity, they sound much like hearing Amy Winehouse and the 1971 Who fight their way out of a Surrealist painting.

But even when I can actually make the stupid site take me to where bands sign up, its security thingie won't show up on the screen so I can't type the letters to avoid spam.

Clearly there was a baby-eating teenage orgy, and they're still cleaning up.

I haven't done this in forever. It's midnight and I've just finished the pages I made myself write for WotF this quarter. Yay for sleep deprivation in the name of art.

Thanks to the people who gave me nice compliments about the creative nonfiction. Here's another one. I read this one at the grad student reading a few weekends ago.

How to Tell It

The first thing to know about Elder Wayne was that he wrestled a bear. He'd slip it in, mention it in passing. He liked people to tease it out of him. "You did what now?" Sometimes he used the story to break up inane conversations. "Hollywood is just being taken over by homosexuals," one older member would say, and Elder Wayne would come right back with, "Did I ever tell you about the time I wrestled a bear?"

On missions, with little in the way of visual, auditory or read entertainment, we all had to gain some skill in oral tradition to relate our adventures. It was a learned skill, honed and practiced as we lay on our beds, unwinding from a day full of heated conversations about theology. Some missionaries were more skilled than others. Wayne was Pavarotti.

When he told it in full, the bear and the bear's siblings were being relocated to a den after they had been tranquilized. Elder Wayne was standing over this particular bear, who, it turns out, was not tranquilized all the way. Groggy but angry, the bear reared up and Elder Wayne tried to push it back down. It didn't go. It tried to claw him with its front paws, but Wayne stayed behind it. As a matter of fact, he got the bear in a full nelson. The bear tore chunks out of his legs as it came more and more awake. Elder Wayne's father, from the front of the den, called out, "Get out in one… two… three… now!" Elder Wayne dove for the door of the den just as his father jabbed the bear with a dose of tranquilizer on the end of a pole.

If he had his way, Wayne would leave the fact that the bear was adolescent and drugged out of it. "We were putting it in a den and it woke up," he would say.

"So it was a teenage bear?" I asked him one night after he had let that information slip.

"Well, yeah," he said.

"How much did it weigh?"

"One hundred-thirty pounds. So yeah, I outweighed it. But a Doberman's like, what, sixty pounds?"

I couldn't begrudge him a few embellishments. He played his part and was eccentrically obsessed with animals. He kept a snapping turtle in the apartment and fed it nightcrawlers, and at one point let a squirrel loose to run around our place. He stared down a big black dog that a woman turned out of her house on us, and brushing past the beast, knocked on her door. "Dogs don't scare me. I wrestled a bear."

Every time Wayne told the bear story, he imbued it with a sense of wonder. The fact that he believed it eventually made me want to believe it. I stopped questioning. Some stories are meant to be told, and heard, and accepted.

I'm back to my creative nonfiction. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

What You Don't Do

They say that depression is the common cold of mental illness. That metaphor works surprisingly well. It is communicable--there's nothing more depressing than living with a depressed person. It has a season--January--and it hits harder in cold rainy climates.

I remember going into my dad's room on Christmas morning, thick with the smell of sweat, his bed dotted with wool blankets that predated my birth. He stared at the ceiling.

"Are you going to come open presents?"

He was, by his own admission, thinking about his childhood Christmas, where his mother, taking a regimen of 50s diet pills, lost her speed-fueled temper and beat him. It made him depressed. When he talked about it, it made everyone depressed. He waded through days at his private clinic and applied for jobs in a fog, while we went deeper into bankruptcy.

"Um. Yeah," he would say after a few minutes.

"Did you see your stocking?"

"Yes. Thank you."

"Santa brought you some gooood stuff."

"Yes. Thank you."

Depression is a disease represented by what someone doesn't do. They don't take interest in sex, they sleep more or less often, they can't concentrate. I wonder how many conversations with my dad might have been lost to depression. I wonder how many times he stared at the ceiling when we were supposed to be talking about spirituality, teenagerhood, or our mutual love of the X-Men.

Elder Coombs was my first depressed missionary companion. We lasted five days. He was five foot one inches tall with bright dark eyes. In his little white shirt, tie and tag, he reminded me of the smallest mamushka doll in a set.

It was well-known throughout the mission that Coombs was "having a hard time." I thought I might help him. The first day we were together, we spoke about our respective punk bands back home. "Of course it all died down once we got girlfriends," Coombs said. "See, I managed to avoid that part," I said. "I'm kind of proud of it. You know, in an I-never-got-action kind of way." He gave me a half-smile.

We went door-to-door through a rural neighborhood, with quarter-mile walks up the driveways. At the first door, a smiling woman said, "We've been looking for a church. Why don’t y'all come back and talk to my whole family?" Elder Coombs brightened for a little while afterwards. "That's the first lead we’ve had in months in this area."

"I'm magic," I said, trying to provoke a response. He gave me another half-smile and stared at the blanket of deep green kudzu falling across the trees.

At the next door, a red-faced man came out, wearing only shorts, sporting ingrown toenails the size and color of plums. "I just don't understand the people from my church," he said. "They say they're going to help you out, but nobody helps me out. Nobody comes to see me. I just sit out here and get lonely and don't nobody come to see me!"

"I know. It can be really frustrating," Elder Coombs said, with complete empathy. "It seems like no one cares."

"Why do people do that?" the man with the ingrown toenails asked. "Seems like everybody wants you to join their church but they don't care about you after you get saved."

"I'll come see you, man," Elder Coombs said.

I couldn't wait to get away from the guy. Elder Coombs talked to him for an hour.

We sat in a creek bed for a break and I took pictures of Coombs holding a huge frog up by his face. "Aw man," he said tonelessly." It peed on me."

"At least it got you first," I joked as I picked it up.

"Yeah," he said as if he deserved it.

The second day we were together Elder Coombs vanished. He left me a note while I was in the shower that said, "Sorry, man, I gotta jet. If there's a problem call the mission president."

If there's a problem? I hadn't been alone in a year and a half. Leaving your mission companion alone was tatamount to a soldier deserting his platoon in the field. We had rationale--that the Bible said two by two, that it had always been done that way. We needed rules. Coombs had committed the ultimate breach of trust.

He came back later that day, having ensured by this breach of the rules that he would be sent home. Or rather, by reporting it, I had ensured that he would go.

There were no hard feelings. We got Chinese food that night and sat on our back porch and talked about punk music, and he gave me the rest of his orange chicken. That night was the first time I saw him laugh.

Elder Remy followed Elder Coombs. In this case, Elder Remy had been sent home from his mission in Australia for depression. After a trial period, he'd proven himself happy enough to go out again.

The first day we were together Elder Remy took a shower with the door wide open, singing "Come, Come Ye Saints" at the top of his lungs. I couldn't help myself. I filled a pitcher full of ice water, snuck in and poured it over his head.

He shrieked, which was pretty much what I was going for. Then he leapt out of the shower and chased me around the apartment, naked and sopping wet. "I'm going to kill you!" he screamed, until he backed me into the kitchen corner and wrapped his hands around my throat. His eyes got smaller and tighter as his grip closed and he breathed, like a bull, through his nostrils. Finally he let go, backing up in naked rage. "Don't ever do that again," he said.

Elder Remy's depression wasn't the cloud that Coombs's had been, or my father's was. He was a volatile, lurching creature who could only exist in extremes. There were times where he would sit on his knees, solemn as a prophet, before the map of our area, trying to divine the spot where we would knock on the right door. Remy said poetic prayers full of pleading and fulfillment. "Praise God and His Christ, for this work is verily true."

Then when he was down he would talk about sex. "Have you ever smelled the fish, man? When a girl starts to get really horny, you know? I was fourteen, and I was talking to this girl I knew on the phone. I was like, 'Hey, have you ever had sex?' and she said, 'No,' and I said, 'Me neither. Want to?' So she came over and we had sex!" It was not unusual to hear such confessions from other missionaries--in spare terms like, "I used to fool around with this girl." What set Remy apart was the detail. "I didn't really know what I was doing and she was really loose and open, you know, and I had never smelled the fish before--it was creeping me out--so I was just like--I think I came?"

He was haunted by his masturbation habit. I later found out it was the reason for his odd way of showering, in order to try and make himself more vulnerable to discovery and less apt to play around. "I just let the hot water touch my dick a little bit and it feels good--sometimes I shove the shampoo bottle in my ass a little bit--and then I have to touch it and pblllltt--" He made a farting noise that was supposed to represent him coming. He used it a lot. "My girlfriend and I used to play around, you know, we'd get all lubed up and she'd rub against me--she was afraid to actually penetrate so I'd be like, no, oh no, it feels too good and pbllllltttt--"

I couldn't help but be fascinated by his open, destructive way of sharing his sexual history. I told myself I was trying to help him, but even then I was writing in my off times, and I knew I was really collecting material. Once he told me, "I've done some gay stuff. I didn't really think of it that way at the time. I was little and my cousin would want to masturbate with me. I guess it was more abuse than gay stuff. But I liked it, you know? I liked him." The stories of his cousin's sexual abuse were the only ones of his sex stories missing the detail and the 'pbllllltttt.'

When he finally imploded, it had been a long and exhausting week full of his self-destruction. It was seven in the evening and I wanted to call it a night, but he stood in the doorway and said,

"We should go do some work."

"I feel sick," I lied.

He changed out of his shirt and tie, which wasn't unusual for him at home, then put on his only set of street clothes. Still not unusual. The front door opened and by the time I realized that he was leaving, he was out. I ran out into the night, but he was a faster runner than me, especially fueled by his madness.

I called the mission president. "It happened again," I said.

After he came back, Elder Remy chided me. "You should have made me work harder," he said. "I know you liked talking about sex. You could have done better. You just encouraged me. And I knew you weren't sick." I knew he was projecting, but I've never forgot those words. I never forgot what didn't happen.

* * *

When my dad was going through the worst of his depression, he came home from work shirtless, his round body burned bright pink. "My patients cancelled, so I just went to the beach for a while," he said, "and stared at the water." The smell of his burnt skin filled our house's hallway, rubbery.

My siblings and I gathered around and laughed a little. "You should have brought some sunblock!"

"I wasn't planning on going," he said, as if unsure why he had.

We gathered around and laughed in lieu of a hug. He had done something. If he hadn't we all knew the afternoon would have been a void, a mass of typicality and ache. I wonder how many sunburned skins and days at the beach he lost, or Elder Remy lost, or the whole world lost.

Labels: creative nonfiction, Depression, Mormon stories, stories

It has been a while since I dared brush the cobwebs of the intertubes.

I'm in a reflective mood.

One of the sad and good things about getting older is that life gets less complicated at the same time it gets busier. I think I could never have handled all the hats I wear now when I was eighteen or twenty-one or even twenty-five: being dad, grad student (graddy daddy), husband, band guy, writer, agent. Okay, so I don't handle those all too well. But other than the constant spectre of the poopy diaper or the occasional Princess Leia costume from Chrissy, life is generally free of surprises.

At the same time, the fact that I'm generally at peace is the biggest surprise of all--when it happens.

Intergalactic Medicine Show, which pays me to ramble, has an announcement.

Cat Rambo has a book!

I forgot to plug my very talented buddy Cat and Jeff Vandermeer's book during my school madness.

Go. Buy it. It is exquisite.

Interrupting my string of creative nonfiction, has anyone heard of a "Googleganger?" It's when you google your name and find someone with the same name.

This is mine. He even has a sister named Melanie and loves George R.R. Martin. Wha?

Following up on yesterday's story, here is a follow up (hopefully without the dingbat problems)

The Kid Who Liked to Play Grand Theft Auto

"Nigger is a bad word, right? You're not supposed to say that word?"

The kid looked up at me from his living room floor where he sat in front of his game. He had been driving around the same segment of a made-up Los Angeles shooting people and stealing cars--and his character in the game had uttered the N-word at least twenty times in the last five minutes.

"Yes it is," I said.

The kid's front teeth rested on his bottom lip and he sucked, a kind of strange involuntary action that creeped me out. I was taking care of this kid at home now, through an independent special-ed care agency I worked for. I’d met him at Meadowbrook High School.
The first time I met him, he was kept in one room all day after he had hit a teacher. He looked at me, made that involuntary suck and said, "Fuck you, cabron!" I, fresh on the job and not sure what to do, waited until he repeated it. Then I said, "Hey, I don’t want to hear that."
He sucked. "Fuck you cabron isn't a bad word."

"Yes it is."

"No it isn't."

"Well I don't want to hear it."

"Fuck you, cabron."

The next day I was assigned to help out the kid’s regular shadow, Jerry, a man who came close to seven feet tall. Jerry had skin like creamed coffee and a set of 'dreds that could have won prizes. He was unfailingly harsh with the kid while I sat behind them in class, keeping up a steady string of lectures. "What are you going to do? You can’t keep getting thrown out of your classes. You need to listen. You need to change. I can’t help you out forever, you know."

"I just want to go home and play Grand Theft Auto," the kid said.

The kid soon decided to hate me. As another teacher asked me where I’d moved from and I told her about leaving Utah, he began a running commentary from where he sat. "Utah is stupid! You’re a gay pussy-ass fag!"

A student who looked Hispanic passed through the special ed department at one point, and the kid shouted, "Nigger! Nigger!" at him.

This inflamed Jerry, and he made the kid stay on a couch. “You don’t get to talk right now,” Jerry said, 'dreds visibly shaking.

Jerry and I sat across the room and the kid kept up his running commentary. "Hey Spencer! Faggot! Faggg-ottt!"

"I wonder if he might have Tourette's syndrome," I said to Jerry.

"Maybe," Jerry said, and his voice was blank enough it was obvious he didn’t give a shit whether the kid had superpowers.

"Touch the penis!" the kid yelled.

I looked up to see the kid masturbating. "Jerry," I said, and Jerry, seeing the display, snapped. He stood in front of the kid, bringing his full shadow to bear. "I don’t want to hear you say or do anything for the rest of the day." Then he drove the kid home.

Months later, while I watched the kid at his home, I imagined Jerry's experience there. It was an expansive suburban house filled with every type of video game controller one could imagine. The kid's mother was an absolute knockout, wrapped in stylish clothes, with hair perfectly coiled and makeup that could have been applied by Monet. When I was there she sat the kid in front of Grand Theft Auto and said, "He is so into games." She looked at the kid. "But it's not okay to repeat things from games, is it?"

I tried to imagine Jerry, dark skin on their white leather couch, telling the knockout mother about the day, about "nigger." What might that word have meant to him? Probably no more than any other obscenity uttered by a mentally disabled person. But what if it didn't? What if he couldn’t disconnect the word from the way Merle had said it, as a sacred identity wrapped within layers of brotherhood?

Jerry quit. I and my boss took charge of the kid. Predictably, within half an hour of our first day he punched both of us and tried to run out of the school. When the principal, a tiny Korean woman, tried to stop him, he attacked her. She lost it as he kicked her. "Bring it on!" the principal shouted, hands going up to a fighting stance. "Bring it on!"

He shouted, "Nigger!"

I have been writing personal essays like mad for my Nonfiction class. I'm going to post some of them here. This is the first one I wrote (apologies for the N-word, but the story really doesn't work without it):

The Second Funniest Story From My Mission

We were out on the eastern edge of Winston-Salem, where tiny old houses smelling of gas heaters thinned out, when we met Merle. He was walking home, covered in dust and wearing a blue handkerchief around his head. He stank of sweat and dirt. He smiled a mouth full of gold teeth at us and said, “I just got saved. In prison!”
Merle was a former Crip from Baltimore. He used the N-word as instinctively as most people use contractions. “I was one bad nigga, let me tell you. If I hadn’t gone to prison I’d be dead. I been shot here,” he said, and pointed at his jaw, “and here,” he pointed to his arm, “and here,” his leg, “here” his side, “here…” The final count was eight places. He shook his head. “Lots of the niggas I used to run with is in the ground, you know?”
We shook our heads like we knew.
I’d be tempted to think he was making this stuff up, but he was so completely, effortlessly honest. He smiled that big gold-toothed smile and said the kinds of things that I had heard about in rap but never believed really happened. “There was this one time I asked my cousin to hold something for me, you know, some stuff. So I called him up and I was like, where’s the smack, nigga? And I knowed that nigga was high. So I went on over there with my glock behind my back and I was like, ‘open up, nigga!’ And he opens up and there’s these two big old niggas there with them baseball bats, and one of them gets me upside the head and I’m stumbling around in the street and I get in my car while those niggas is beating on me and I start shooting like crazy, can’t see a damn thing, and I’m just waving the gun over my head and shooting.” He laughed like we would laugh with him. “I peeled out and shot sixteen rounds—I didn’t hit one of them niggas!”
At the end of the night, after we handed him a Book of Mormon and asked him to pray about it, he got up and solemnly put his scarred, sweaty arms around us, rich with his odor. “Y’alls my niggas now,” he said as he embraced us.
It was probably the greatest compliment a suburban white boy, pouring his heart out on the streets of North Carolina, could hope for. For one hilarious moment, the gospel of Jesus Christ had given us all an identity as one. We were each other’s brothers, companions, niggas.

I'm in a reflective mood this Christmas.

There was never a time when I didn't picture myself as a writer. When I was a kid I wrote and designed my own book line called Live! Fights! Books. (Don't ask me why Books didn't get an exclamation point.) There was a trilogy of space adventures that revolved around the difference between a sandwich and a sand witch. There was a western adventure about a brave herd of mustangs trying to avoid an evil mustang hunter armed with a Super Gun. And there was my magnum opus, SuperTiger, which pretty much explains itself.

I always pictured writing as part of a whole spectrum of genius I would one day display. I would be a poet/singer/actor/artist and if I was good at something else, I'd do that too. Around thirteen, I dropped all of those other aspirations and decided writing was the big one. I would be a writer or... well, there wasn't really an or. I just would be a writer.

My feelings about writing haven't really changed since that day. I often wish they had. I tell myself that if things had gone a little differently--if, for example, Marvel Comics hadn't cancelled my favorite titles, or if I hadn't just been seduced by the beginning of Robert Jordan's series, I would have ended up as an artist, not a writer at thirteen. It's not true. I always did words with pictures. I always read instead of looking. When I got into comic books, I wanted to write and draw them.

Who can tell why people like to tell stories? I have my personal favorite theories--from the practical evolutionary standpoint that the left brain imposes order on random information from the right, and that for every new development in society our left brain compensates too well with stories upon stories--or Tim O'Brien's poetic musing that a story is a form of personal salvation, a reconciliation to the unknown, a kind of prayer. From one standpoint, I'm especially starved spiritually, and from the other just confused. But I don't really know.

In high school, after I learned to read and like other things besides epic fantasy, I kept writing epic fantasy. In my creative writing class then and now, I could write the cool literary stuff that got me instant respect, but when I went home I slaved away on a very bad Robert Jordan ripoff. I read Vonnegut and Salinger and Kerouac, more than I read epic fantasy after a while, but I still wanted to write a series of five thousand-page books. I don't know if it will ever happen, but I still want to do it. I don't think that has much to do with left brain/right brain or reconciling myself to the unknown. I think it's more that I'm trying to recapture the sheer bliss of reading science fiction and fantasy for the first time when I was thirteen, with no skepticism, no recognition of genre clichés, and nothing else in my life more important than the next book. Writing lately has felt a lot like slowly shoving pushpins through my eyelids and into my pupils. But I still feel the urge to produce something long, intricate, and exciting.

I've almost forgotten how to blog.

I really love Neil Gaiman's writing sometimes. Sometimes I have such high expectations that I end up a little disappointed, which is what happened with American Gods. But then sometimes I reread an old story and find my little heart warmed. I'd like to write a review on Death: The Time of Your Life, but anyone who's mildly familiar with comics has heard of it, read it, and liked it. It's perfect. It makes me happy. There's my review.

Eeh. I just realized I've got another review due in a couple of weeks.

So our place is going condo and we're moving again to a very nice big upstairs apartment in a charming neighborhood by Bellingham High School. The neighborhood is full of churches, which leads me to believe that Adia will grow up believing that Buddha, Jesus, Yahweh and Ahura Mazda play cards on weekends. Who has the best poker face? Debate.

Christmas time is here again. I am trying to make gluten-free pie crust. I am insane.

Doris Lessing's acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize. Please read this.

Among his many rants, my friend Orson Scott Card likes to heap venom upon English programs and the kind of writing they produce. He's talking here about literary writing, which he doesn't read as a genre. I do read it, and I sell it, too. There is some really good stuff out there--Chuck Palahniuk, Dave Eggers, Christopher Miller (okay, so I don't read female literary writers, but I didn't realize I wasn't doing it...) and then there is some crap. The filmmakers behind Everything is Illuminated had the right idea in trimming all of Jonathon Safran Foer's self-indulgent sections set in his family's past. Every time I left Alex and Jonathon to go back to Jonathon's ancestors in that book, I winced. But for the most part one has to understand the conventions of a genre to enjoy it. If you don't understand that a fantasy book will take great pleasure in anthropological/historical details like what kind of surcoats Lord Baltingham's troops are wearing, you probably won't get through A Game of Thrones. And if you don't understand that literary fiction tries to weave poetry into the prose, you won't get through Fight Club. So there he's expressing personal preference rather than some higher aesthetic taste.

But.

Nearing the end of my first quarter as a Master's English student, I cannot believe that I am studying what I'm studying, or expected to write what I'm expected to write, and Card's comment about the universities of America is making horrible, horrible sense. This is supposed to be a program in creative writing and English. I've got one creative writing class which has been a lot of fun. It's not asking me to produce nearly as much as I want to (or as much as anyone who is not a bestseller must to make a living at writing) but it is fun. I have noticed there is a curious lack of the nuts and bolts usually present in genre workshops. We're not going over the basics of character--they want something, something stands in their way, or the basics of plot--action rises and builds and questions are suspended until the end--but we are having fun sharing our writing with each other. In some senses, I feel like I've gotten the workshop without the lecture first. That's not the problem, though.

What really gets me is the interrelationship between English departments and creative writers. English academic writing, based in literary theory, (really based in five French guys from the 1960s) produces the most unreadable texts in the world. It doesn't allow for anything like an appealing analysis, like a movie review one might read in the newspaper. No. Nobody reads Foucauldian analyses except Foucauldians. If you even know who Foucault is and why he matters, chances are you got exposed to him in a theory class. It's useless. Nobody bothers to try and make it accessible, which is a clear indicator of the fact that it has no use outside the small group of enthusiasts.

What is more, the critiques offered by my professors rarely break into the nuts-and-bolts that real writing, the kind of writing an agent deals with, must know. My teachers tell me what the paper needs in vague generalities and then when I say, "How do I do that?" they look at me as though I've just asked them to write the paper for me.

AAAAAH!

I am procrastinating and damn proud of it.

It takes a lot to procrastinate when you have a full schedule. For example, I could make this blog about agenting. I have been calling editors for my very first time and submitting some client manuscripts. But that would be work.

I could write about writing. I've been slogging away at my novel every morning around 5ish. I would love to get some readers for it. But that's work.

I came home early from school with some bogus story about how all my materials to write my paper are here. So my adorable wife and child left, ruining my plan to spend the afternoon with them instead of on the paper. Now here I am in an empty house, and I almost checked my agent email and my school email before I realized that was work.

For that matter, parenting is work, so it's a good thing they left.

I thought about cleaning the house, since our lovely little one is a perpetual motion machine. But that's productive. I'm trying to be unproductive. And I'm shutting down any thoughts of going for a run despite the brownie sundae I just had for lunch. I am sitting on my ass and proud of it.

I didn't win Writers of the Future. Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.

Depending on what the status of the published finalists is, I may try to sell the story to Analog. I got a nice note from Stan Schmidt last year on a story that I haven't been able to rewrite, mostly for lack of effort. Maybe he'll like this one.

However, it seems that they have enjoyed my most recent offering enough to place me in the final round again. Yeah.

I went to grad school to write. What am I doing right now? Avoiding writing. Yep, that's my ambition.

Adia has recently learned to crawl, which is detailed at Mommy's blog. She is terrible. She will find whatever might be left on the floor after Chrissy vacuumed and eat it. It's usually some kind of hair. The other day I think she found dog hair. There's never been a dog in our apartment.

This has led to somewhat of an existential crisis for Chrissy, given that she's always been morally opposed to vacuuming and cleaning floors, and we must do it constantly. When we got used to living with each other, our deal was that I would avoid taking out the trash and she would never have to clean the floor.

This morning she vacuumed and I took out the trash and we didn't even notice we were doing each other's jobs. This child has made a mockery of values.

I would like to send a memo to anyone who's sent me a full manuscript in the last few months and is chewing their toes waiting for a response. (I'm looking at you, Jaden.) I am swamped with many things, as is the nature of a part-time agent, and I want to give your book the time it deserves. So I doubt I'll read these before the new year. Sorry. They are on my list of things to do, and they will get done, but at the moment there are a thousand other things screaming for attention.

Think of it as your first lesson in the excruciating slowness of the publishing industry. It's a lot like someone I dated in college. By the time she got around to a definite idea of what our relationship meant, I was starting not to care. Isn't that reassuring?

Labels: L. Perkins Agency, Literary Agent, Mommy